News just in as Cleanzine was about to broadcast, revealed that London’s Brent Council is to make £54m worth of cuts to services. According to The Times, litter (which of course shouldn’t exist in the first place!) will no longer be cleared from residential streets. The fact that the council’s CCTV cameras are also under threat paints an unpleasant picture of filthy, litter-strewn streets with no chance of finding, fining and re-educating the offenders…

In other, similar news, father-of-four Craig Lavelle is so incensed by his local council – Bury – cutting non-recyclables bin collections to once every three weeks that he’s offering fellow residents a private collection service at £8.50 a time. As he’s already in the waste disposal business, I’m assuming he’s done the figures.

Bury is the first council in England to dare to collect bins so infrequently and it claims that as well as saving £800,000 a year, it will force residents to recycle rather than discard. Of course it may also encourage fly tipping – although those considering this will need to ask themselves how long we can continue producing so much waste – and if they don’t have a social conscience, whether they’re going to be able to afford the fine and face a potential jail term plus the shame of being outed by the local paper!

Reader comments following the Mail Online report, reveal a 50:50-ish split between those who are also incensed and those who could quite easily cope if their bins were emptied monthly or even less frequently. The consensus seemed to be that disposable nappies were the main problem. So what can be done about those, I wonder?

Bury’s recycling scheme is not a patch on the one I enjoy but it could, no doubt, be tweaked to placate its residents. I know I’ve used Cleanzine previously to back the move from weekly collections to fortnightly and have said that a council tax discount might encourage residents to recycle more waste. I think now is the time for councils everywhere to give this option serious thought, considering the money that can be saved by cutting the frequency of collections.